A hand-held scanner is portable and can be held in your hand. It can scan about 1/2 of a page, so you usually have to move the scanner over the page twice. Once for the first half of the page, and once for the second half. To use, you simply slowly move the scanner over the page you want scanned. The software that supports your scanner will do the rest, and soon the image will appear on your monitor.

Hand-held scanners work best for scanning small images. However, you must have a steady hand when moving the scanner across the page. Otherwise, you will get fuzzy images on your monitor. These generally attach to a serial port on your PC.

The flatbed or desktop scanner can scan a page at a time. You simply lift the lid of the scanner, and put the sheet in. You tell the scanning software that you are ready to scan and it does the rest.

Desktop scanners work best for scanning pages. These generally scan images more clearly than the hand-held scanner. These come with their own expansion card for installation.